History Quotes - Page 61

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.

Criss Jami

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

Edward Said

As for the belief that humanity is mostly good, Secular humanism, when in that alignment, always presumes the existence of a higher power, or some god-like influence on man. Because it then becomes the belief that people are generally good and should be protected from the wiles of religion, as though this dark, vague and ignorant force once fell from the heavens, latched onto the purer hearts and minds of men and women, and, in all its forms, controlled and polluted the whole of human history. He says, 'When we defeat religion, humanity will be free.' But, if he were duly consistent, if he were really at all as secular as he claims, he might as well admit to what is actually an underlying brand of nihilistic cynicism: 'When we defeat humans, humanity will be free.

Criss Jami

By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites on special days, the orgy kept it under control, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it transformed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force. It permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles to regress into a more authentic state of nature, which modern psychologists have associated with the Freudianid or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break—like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.

Neel Burton

What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.

Elaine Pagels

Though the Reformation originated with the Lord's fresh move through various reformers, in a rather short time the resulting churches became institutionalized with a mixture of politics, human organization, and hierarchy.

Henry Hon

Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.

Stephen R. Prothero

Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_.

Kage Baker

But I can no longer ready any faith's Napoleonic saber rattling without picturing smoking rubble on cable news. I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.

Sarah Vowell

It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.

Christopher Hitchens

The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.

Catherine Keller

When men follow justice the city blooms, the earth bears rich harvests, and children and flocks increase; but for the unjust all nature is hostile, the people waste away from famine, and a whole city may reap the evil fruit of one man's ill deeds.

Christopher Henry Dawson

Today everybody admits that something is wrong with the world, and the critics of Christianity are the very people who feel this most. The most violent attacks on religion come from those who are most anxious to change the world, and they attack Christianity because they think that it is an obstructive force that stands in the way of a real reform of human life. There has seldom been a time in which men were more dissatisfied with life and the more conscious of the need for deliverance, and if they turn away from Christianity it is because they feel that Christianity is a servant of the established order and that it has no real power or will to change the world and to rescue man from his present difficulties. They have lost their faith in the old spiritual traditions that inspired civilization in the past, and they tend to look for a solution in some external practical remedy such as communism, or the scientific organisation of life; something definite and objective that can be applied to society as a whole.

Christopher Henry Dawson

Men die in battle women die in childbirth.

Philippa Gregory

The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

Philippa Gregory

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

Salman Rushdie

He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.

Leanna Renee Hieber

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

Christopher Hitchens

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Thomas Carlyle

I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.

Savo Heleta

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.

Wilhelm Reich

When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.

Harry A. Blackmun

I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

Michael Chabon

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

Christopher Hitchens

[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.

Christopher Hitchens

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.]

James Madison

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

Richard Lederer

The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!

Harvey Milk

If you were to love, love not for the lust that you yearn but the rather the pain that you earn with it. Remember though that the ones who brave the pain are eternally bound in Cupid's chain. It is these chains that many of us fear. The fear of losing the freedom of choosing for self. The fear of placing the needs of our better halves before our own. The fear is understandable for history has taught us to despise and the society has given us the chance to entice. However, if you were to pause and think ever about - love - then do remember that the chain which upon acceptance binds you in amour is the same which upon rejection arrests us to an ague called lonesome depression. Few survive in love, but fewer without it.

Adhish Mazumder

There is no such thing as a historical fatality there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Whenever i have Wealthy wealth trust me i will change the history of poverty

Saad Khan

History is the hallmark of humanity.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The event of history is hidden in time.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.

St. Augustine of Hippo

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

Toni Morrison

It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.

Mary Renault

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough

I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. We have an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and I think people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling.

Valerie Fitzgerald

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....

Anna Comnena

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

Beck

I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.

David Freeman Hawke

Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one’s first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality.

Shatrujeet Nath

It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

Kate Morton

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Lee Benson

For when all else is done, only words remain. Words endure.

Kate Mosse

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

Esther M. Friesner

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

David McCullough

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Dan Simmons

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

John Kennedy Toole

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

Criss Jami

But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible worlds. I cannot bear this cold mathematician's God who sees all the universe as nothing more than an elaborate problem to be solved. Such a world is a world with no meaning, one in which one history is no more or less preferable to any other.

Dexter Palmer

To those who in their turn selectively handle Mormon history and discourage our probing it in a number of areas, one needs to say (or at least to ask): Haven’t we been, if anything, overly cautious, overly mistrustful, overly condescending to a membership and a public who are far more perceptive and discerning than we often give them credit for? Haven’t we, in our care not to offend a soul or cause anyone the least misunderstanding, too much deprived such individuals of needful occasions for personal growth and more in-depth life-probing experience? In our neurotic cautiousness, our fear of venturing, haven’t we often settled for an all-too-shallow and confining common denominator that insults the very Intelligence we presume to glorify and is also dishonest because, deep down, we all know better (to the extent that we do)? Isn’t our intervention often too arbitrary, reflecting the hasty, uninformed reaction of only one or a couple of influential objectors? Don’t we in the process too severely and needlessly test the loyalty and respect of and lose credibility with many more than we imagine? Isn’t there a tendency among us, bred by the fear of displeasing, to avoid healthy self-disclosure—public or private—and to pretend about ourselves to ourselves and others? Doesn’t this in turn breed loneliness and make us, more than it should, strangers to each other? And when we are too calculating, too self-conscious, too mistrustful, too prescriptive, and too regimental about our roots and about one another’s aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life, aren’t we self-defeating?

Thomas F. Rogers

Την επομένη δεν κουνήθηκα, όλη μέρα αναμασούσα τις σκέψεις μου. Σκεφτόμουν την Ιστορία, με κεφαλαία, και τη δική μου ιστορία, τη δική μας. Αυτοί που γράφουν την πρώτη γνωρίζουν τη δεύτερη; Πώς η μνήμη κάποιων συγκρατεί αυτό που άλλοι έχουν ξεχάσει ή δεν το είδαν ποτέ; Ποιος έχει δίκιο, αυτός που είναι αποφασισμένος να μην εγκαταλείψει στο σκοτάδι το παρελθόν ή αυτός που πετάει στη λήθη ό,τι δεν τον βολεύει; Μήπως, για να ζήσεις, για να συνεχίσεις να ζεις, ίσως πρέπει ν’ αποφασίσεις ότι η πραγματικότητα δεν είναι απολύτως αληθινή ή μήπως πρέπει να επιλέξεις μιαν άλλη πραγματικότητα όταν αυτή που έχεις βιώσει σου είναι δυσβάσταχτη; Άλλωστε αυτό δεν έκανα στο στρατόπεδο; Δεν επέλεξα να ζήσω με την ανάμνηση και την προσδοκία της Εμέλια, πετώντας την καθημερινότητά μου στην εξωπραγματικότητα του εφιάλτη; Μήπως η Ιστορία είναι η μέγιστη αλήθεια υφασμένη από εκατομμύρια ξεχωριστά ψέματα, όπως οι παλιές κουβέρτες που έφτιαχνε η Φεντορίν για να μας θρέψει όταν ήμουν παιδί και φαίνονταν καινούριες και πανέμορφες μέσα στο ουράνιο τόξο των χρωμάτων τους, ενώ αποτελούνταν από κουρέλια, ανομοιογενή σχήματα, μαλλιά αμφίβολης ποιότητας κι άγνωστης προέλευσης;

Philippe Claudel

Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?

Howard Zinn

The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith.

Christopher Henry Dawson

Why do many believers insist on repeatedly pointing to the crimes of 20th century dictators who led officially atheistic societies as some sort of evidence of their god's existence? It makes no sense.If the rivers of blood on Stalin's hands and Mao's hands, for example, are supposed to prove there is a god, then what do the oceans of blood on the hands of several thousand years' worth of religious kings, queens, presidents, popes, priests, generals, Crusadersm jihadists and tribal chiefs prove? It's not, of course, but if bodycount is somehow the measure of a god's likelihood of existence, then believers lose.It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon.

Guy P. Harrison

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History Quotes - Page 61

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